


Jungle Rot

by kj_graham



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Eating Disorders, Graphic Depictions of Eating Disorders, Heavy Angst, M/M, Sam Winchester Has Mental Health Issues, Sam Winchester Has an Eating Disorder, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, castiel tries to help, this does not end happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:14:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27772849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kj_graham/pseuds/kj_graham
Summary: The hollowness in his gut aches, paining him as though his ribs have collapsed down around it and caged it in. Maybe the vines in his skull have spilled down his throat and made themselves a home in stomach acid, too.
Relationships: Castiel/Sam Winchester
Comments: 2
Kudos: 48





	Jungle Rot

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains graphic depictions of an eating disorder, despite the metaphorical language used to describe it, and it does not end on a positive note. Please take care of yourselves and tread lightly. If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, reach out for help--you deserve to recover.

The research should have been done by now.

It’s all Sam can think about. If he had started on it earlier, if he hadn’t taken such a long break to talk to Dean, if he hadn’t lost over an hour to the battles of breakfast and dinner each…if they could even be _called_ breakfast and dinner…

The research should be done by now, and it isn’t, and it’s driving Sam up a wall. He promised he’d have it done by Monday morning, and it’s already Saturday night, and he has hours upon hours of work still to do.

He still has time tonight. He tries to tell himself that; he still has time to save it. But the words swim a bit in his view, and he can’t quite pay attention. He’s glad no one is in the room with him to hear his stomach growling.

Sam clicks through a few more sites, gets through a few more pages, but his concentration is waning, and with it, his disgust grows and grows, a wicked, vined thing overtaking the inside of his skull.

This should be done already, and it’s his fault that it isn’t, and something will need to be done about it.

Starting with sleep. If he needs to stay up all night to get this done, he will. It’s only fair after he’s wasted so much time, even if the thought of pulling an all-nighter makes him want to weep. Sam isn’t cut out for long sleepless stretches, anymore; they turn him inside out and upside down, strip him of his tenuous hold on reality. Already, this week, he has missed two nights of rest; he cannot afford another one.

His head is starting to pound. The hollowness in his gut aches, paining him as though his ribs have collapsed down around it and caged it in. Maybe the vines in his skull have spilled down his throat and made themselves a home in stomach acid, too.

He’s always hungry, now. His meager meals don’t do much to solve that, but it’s alright. He deserves it. He deserves the hunger, the weight sliding off his bones like a waterfall, the viney rot taking him over and turning him prickly. He doesn’t do enough. He doesn’t work hard enough, smart enough, fast enough. He isn’t enough of a brother to Dean, just as he wasn’t enough of a son to John. He isn’t enough of a father to Jack or enough of a partner to Castiel.

Letting the rot take him, then, is easier. The vines pressing barbed against the underside of his skin don’t hurt the same, that way. They hurt easier, hurt justified, hurt _right_.

All it does, now, is distract him. Sam pulls a hand through his hair—he really should be careful with it, it’s getting weaker and weaker, choked out by the too-large leaves of the vines—and flips through his notebook. He’s copied barely anything new down; what is there doesn’t feel like it’s coherent.

Sam drops his head into his hands. He kicks out at the chair next to him, simultaneously relieved and further aggravated when it barely moves over the library floor.

The vines should just take him completely. They would probably do better at his life than he does.

Sam huffs. He looks back at his laptop, even though his eyes burn from the strain of blue light, and rereads the same sentence three times over before it actually sinks into his mind.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been when he hears two pairs of footsteps enter the room. His hands are shaking; he doesn’t think he’s absorbed a single thing he’s read or seen.

He glances up. Jack and Cas are standing just inside the doorway. On another day, he’d find the nearly identical looks of concern on their faces endearing. The vines are in control of too much at the moment, so he just finds it stifling and agitating.

“Are you alright, Sam?” Cas asks, and the compassion in his voice makes Sam wish the vines would make him bleed.

“I’m fine,” he says, just a touch stiffly. “Did you need something?”

Cas narrows his eyes. He clearly doesn’t believe Sam.

“I wanted to watch a movie,” Jack says quietly. “With you and Cas. But if you’re busy, I understand.”

“I have to finish this research,” Sam mutters. He’s disappointing his son, he knows, but it’s just another reason that the vines become an easier barbed wire net to fall into.

“We can watch it later, then,” Jack says. His voice is easy; he doesn’t seem upset. It should make Sam feel better, but it just makes the vines multiply in his gut.

Sam nods tersely. He skims over the same sentence over and over again, as if repetition alone will sear it into his optic nerves. Cas is whispering to Jack, and then Sam hears one set of footsteps leave and the other approach the table.

“I’m fine,” Sam repeats without looking up. “Just need to finish this.”

“Sam,” Cas says, and reaches for his hand. It’s pale and bony and ugly in his grip, and Sam hates it. “You aren’t fine. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Sam insists, rereading the sentence again. “This research just has to get done. Go be with Jack, I’ll see you when I’m done.”

Cas sighs softly. “You’ve been at this for hours. You should take a break.”

“I can’t,” Sam snips, vines bitter and sharp at the back of his throat. “I need to get this done. I don’t have time for a break.”

Cas searches his face for a moment. Sam wonders what he finds; what failures, what flaws, what fissures. If he can see the vines colonizing him inside and out.

“Please come find us when you’re done,” Cas says quietly. “I’ll be back to check on you if you aren’t done in another hour.”

Sam looks between his blinding-bright screen, his incoherent notebook scribblings, and the arc of open books surrounding him. He’ll need far longer than an hour.

He just makes a noise in response. Something noncommittal, nothing Cas could mistake for agreement.

“I’ll be back,” Cas repeats, squeezing Sam’s hand. “Don’t push too hard, Sam.”

Sam restrains himself from rolling his eyes until Cas is out of the room. The whole point of this is to push; he normally doesn’t push hard _enough_.

The clock is mocking him. This is the conclusion Sam comes to after forty-five minutes of no progress. The vines push so hard against his skin that it burns.

He doesn’t even shut his laptop when he gets up. He wavers, his vision scrambling into peppered static for a moment, and then he’s out of the room and down the hall as fast as his legs will carry him.

He already knows he won’t eat tomorrow after being such a failure today. But even that punishment feels too far out of reach.

The bunker has single-person bathrooms scattered through the hallways. Sam frequents the one with the busted lock, because it’s the one that everyone would avoid, by logic, and the one that the vines like the best.

They’re growing down his arms, now, as he shuts the door behind him. Twisted, curlicued green erupts from his fingertips as he collapses to the ground, relishing the bruising pain in his knees, and opens his mouth.

His hands are vines in their entirety, now. Soon, it will become all of him. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Sam aches for it to overtake him, for the rot to free him from suffering and deliver him from temptation.

The vines scrape his tongue, thorns leaving bloody gouges in their wake as he sticks two fingers down the back of his throat. He lurches forward, gagging, and spit drips viscous from the vines unfolding all around him. He’s going to be remade in greenery.

He counts the heaves as they come, trying to judge how many he has left. His vined hands drip with dinner, and he’s fairly sure all he has left is breakfast, when the door to the bathroom swings open.

Sam freezes. He looks up slowly, his face a mess of tears and snot and gastric juice, and swallows raw at the sight of Castiel in the doorway.

He doesn’t look surprised. He doesn’t look angry, or disappointed. He just looks like _Cas_ , neutral face somehow unraveled by the unbridled compassion in his eyes, and it makes Sam want to spool all the vines back into himself and hide them away forever.

“Are you done?” Cas asks gently. He steps into the bathroom, shuts the door behind him, and reaches for the hand towel hanging by the sink.

Sam doesn’t answer. He’s staring at his hands, at his congealing insides in the bowl, at the insidious evergreen rot marching him down a path he isn’t sure he even wants to venture.

The faucet runs loud; Sam thinks everything feels loud to him, these days. The vines amplify everything.

Cas kneels down next to him. The sopping hand towel drips onto his hands, runs water in rivulets down his arms and stains his coat dark.

“I think you should come to bed after we’re done here,” Cas says quietly. He reaches for Sam’s hand and waits until Sam lets him take it, then attentively wipes it clean. Sam thinks the vines must look so ugly to him.

“I need to finish the research,” Sam mutters.

Cas shakes his head. He finishes cleaning Sam’s hands, flips the towel to the clean side, and silently asks permission to clean his face. “You can finish the research tomorrow. You are no help to yourself in this state.”

The vines slither through him. They puff with distaste at Castiel’s words, pushing their thorns into the rawhide of Sam’s neck. _I’m no help to anyone. Better to let the vines have me,_ he thinks, but doesn’t say it. Useless to say it. Cas would only want to disagree with him.

Sam says nothing as Cas flushes the toilet. He says nothing as Cas drops the dirtied towel into the sink, and he says nothing as Cas guides him out of the room with a hand on his bony, vine-puckered back. He says nothing as Cas guides him down the hall to their room, and nothing as Cas asks him to change into sleep clothes.

He says nothing as they lay down, Cas's arms around his skeletal frame simultaneously soothing and upsetting, but Cas does.

“Just sleep, Sam. We’ll figure everything else out in the morning.”

Sam knows that they won’t. There is nothing that he would like to figure out.

These vines in him, sometimes they leave him screaming. Sometimes he claws at his skin, trying to get rid of them, wishing he’d somehow avoided their grasp. Sometimes he begs Dean or Cas to make it alright again.

Sometimes these vines in him just make him angry. Tonight, he will kindle himself into a fire, will lay here plotting all the ways Cas will never win, all the ways he will ensure he keeps the vines, all the reasons why he deserves what they do to him. He will enumerate in detail all the things about himself that infuriate him, lay them all out bare for the vines to see.

He will wake in the morning with just a little more jungle rot poking through his marrow. He will pretend it isn’t there, he’ll hide it from Dean and Cas and Jack as best as he knows how, but the whole time he’ll be praying.

_Fix me, fix me, fix me…_


End file.
